Just Mercy Rhetorical Analysis

1418 Words3 Pages

Rhetoric Appeals in Just Mercy. Just Mercy is a passionate story full of different emotions. It makes the readers feel emotions by using ethos, logos, and pathos. Pathos appeals to the audience by using emotions, logos appeals by using logic or reason, and ethos appeals by the speaker having credibility or authority. Just Mercy was written by Bryan Stevenson and published October 21st, 2014. The novel is about Bryan, a Harvard law school graduate who works on death row cases. He works with a lot of different cases, but the novel primarily focuses on Walter McMillian. Walter McMillian was a man accused of a murder that there was no way he could have committed, but since he was a man of color and had a relationship with a white woman, the murder …show more content…

He gets abused, raped, and mentally hurt because he was put into an adult prison as a 14 year old pathos is used to show how mad Stevenson was. Who is responsible for this? How could we ever allow this?”(Stevenson 102). Stevenson really emphasizes his emotions and intends to provoke the reader to feel outraged and upset by the situation, too. He leaves it open to the reader though, not telling them to feel that way, but just putting the facts and his emotions and it makes them feel the same without telling them exactly. By using the rhetorical appeal of pathos, he intends to make the reader feel this provoking feeling of the change to the judicial system and ending the discrimination. In conclusion, pathos is used throughout the book, with Stevenson using specific wording and phrasing to make the reader feel provoked, upset, and outraged about the racial discrimination and the judicial system's flaws and help the reader see how messed up it is. Stevenson likes to use the ethos in the novel as well and does it really well. Stevenson uses ethos throughout the novel because he has experience and it can be easily seen how credible he

More about Just Mercy Rhetorical Analysis

Open Document